Collingridge dilemma
The Collingridge dilemma is a methodological quandary in which efforts to influence or control the further development of technology face a double-bind problem:
- An information problem: impacts cannot be easily predicted until the technology is extensively developed and widely used.
- A powerproblem: control or change is difficult when the technology has become entrenched.
The idea was coined by
Background
In "This Explains Everything," edited by John Brockman, technology critic Evgeny Morozov explains Collingridge's idea by quoting Collingridge himself: "When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult, and time-consuming."[3]
In "The Pacing Problem, the Collingridge Dilemma &
One solution to Collingridge dilemma is the "Precautionary Principle." Adam Thierer defines it as the belief that new innovations should not be embraced "until their developers can prove that they will not cause any harm to individuals, groups, specific entities, cultural norms, or various existing laws, norms, or traditions".[4] If they fail to do so, this innovation should be "prohibited, curtailed, modified, junked, or ignored".[5] This definition has been criticized by Kevin Kelly who believe such a principle is ill-defined[4] and is biased against anything new because it drastically elevates the threshold for anything innovative. According to the American philosopher Max More, the Precautionary Principle "is very good for one thing — stopping technological progress...not because it leads in bad directions, but because it leads in no direction at all."[5] But the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development defines the precautionary principle as ""Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."[6] So rather than conceived as imposing no change until proof of safety is produced, this definition of the precautionary principle is meant to legitimate protective measures, attempting to avoid the desire of a technology's advocates to delay legislation until irrefutable evidence of harm can be produced.
Collingridge's solution was not exactly the precautionary principle but rather the application of "Intelligent Trial and Error," a process by which decision making power remains decentralized, changes are manageable, technologies and infrastructures are designed to be flexible, and the overall process is oriented towards learning quickly while keeping the potential costs as low as possible.[7] Collingridge advocated ensuring that innovation occurs more incrementally so as to better match the pace of human learning and avoiding technologies whose design was antithetical to an Intelligent Trial and Error process.
Current context
The Collingridge Dilemma applies well to a world where Artificial Intelligence and Cloud are gaining ground and developers are consuming new technology at a rapid pace. Governing AI, Cloud or other similar exponential technology without slowing the pace of development of the technology is a big challenge, governments and organizations now face.
References
- ISBN 0-312-73168-X
- ISSN 2567-8833.
- ISBN 0062230174)
- ^ a b c "The Pacing Problem, the Collingridge Dilemma & Technological Determinism". Technology Liberation Front. 2018-08-16. Retrieved 2018-09-23.
- ^ a b Kelly, Kevin (2010). What technology wants. Viking Press.
- ^ Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. United Nations. 1992.
- ^ The Management of Scale: Big Organizations, Big Technologies, Big Mistakes. Routledge. 1992.